Edward James Wayland, geologist and archaeologist, was the
son of Edward Wayland and his wife Emily, born Street. He was educated at the
City of London College, the Royal College of Science, and the Royal School of
Mines (the latter two forming part of the Imperial College of Science and
Technology, London), and also completed an apprenticeship in building and
architecture. In 1909 he conducted geological research in Egypt as a Marshall
Research Scholar in palaeontology of the Royal College of Science. Two years
later he went to Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique) to conduct geological
exploration as part of the Memba Minerals Expedition. He collected some stone
implements in the Monapo gravels near the town of Mozambique (the implements
are now in the British Museum) and described them in 'Notes on the occurrence
of stone implements in the province of Mozambique' (Man, 1915).
In 1912 Wayland was appointed as assistant mineral surveyor
in the government service of Ceylon, where he also collected stone artefacts,
and from 1916 to 1919 did war service in France during World War I (1914-1918).
In 1919 the British government sent him to Uganda as a geological expert, where
he remained as government geologist and later as the first director of the
Geological Survey of Uganda. During the next 20 years he published numerous
reports and papers on the geology and prehistory of Uganda, many of them on the
Pleistocene and its pluvial periods and their associated Stone Age artefacts. He
recorded hundreds of cave sites with Wilton industries and found evidence of
profound climate changes. Among others he collaborated with L.S.B. Leakey and
C. van Riet Lowe and with the latter wrote The
Pleistocene geology and prehistory of Uganda (1952). He was particularly
interested in the earliest prehistoric stone artefacts and believed that he had
found these in the simply fractured pebbles and flakes in the earliest terraces
of the rivers of northern Uganda, particularly the Kafu River. The existence of
this so-called Kafuan culture has not been widely accepted and its artefacts
are believed to be natural products rather than being made by humans.
In 1922 Wayland visited South Africa to study South African
mining methods and compare its geological problems with those of Uganda. During
his visit he found a pebble industry at Belfast which he likened to the Kafuan
culture. At another site near Belfast he found artefacts which he thought
equivalent to the Sangoan culture on the shore of Lake Victoria, which he had
described in 1920. He and M.R. Drennan* reported on some of this work in 'Some
account of a pebble industry in the Transvaal' (Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 1929, Vol.
17(4), pp. 333-340). Years later he wrote 'From an archaeological notebook' (South African Archaeological Bulletin,
1950), dealing with the antiquity of humans in southern Africa.
During World War II (1939-1945) Wayland did war duty in
Dover and Gibraltar and then joined a bomb disposal unit of the Royal
Engineers. In 1943 he was sent to the Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana) to
develop water resources and served as the first director of the Geological
Survey of the territory. During and after this period he published 'Drodsky's
Cave' (Geographical Journal, 1944) on
a cave system in Ngamiland, 'More about the Kalahari' (Ibid, 1953), and 'Outlines of prehistory and Stone Age climatology
in the Bechuanaland Protectorate' (Academie
royale des Sciences coloniales, Section des Sciences naturelles et medicales,
1954).
Wayland was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society of
London in 1912, was a member of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, a
Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, an associate of the Royal
College of Science and was honoured as a commander of the Order of the British
Empire (CBE) in 1938. He was awarded the Bigsby Medal of the Geological Society
of London in 1933 and the Victoria Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in
1935. In 1917 he married Ellen Morrison.
